Spring Concert: Missa Solemnis

The Barnard-Columbia Chorus presents Beethoven’s immortal Missa Solemnis, his last and greatest choral and orchestral setting of the texts of the Roman Catholic Ordinary of the Mass. Composed from 1819–1823, the mass premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia under the patronage of Prince Nikolai Galitzin. Although it is considered by many to be an atypical work, even for Beethoven, it stands alone as an achievement, as music critic Donald Tovey well knew when he wrote, “Not even Bach or Handel can show a greater sense of space and of sonority.... There is no choral and no orchestral writing, earlier or later, that shows a more thrilling sense of the individual colour of every chord.”